bttoddx

joined 1 year ago
[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

I sure hope so. I'm just worried that we won't have a mature enough community to strike while the iron is hot. I really want an alternative to succeed, and have for some time. I just fear that if the economy somehow turns around and tech companies start getting their VC money again, all the big companies will just keep on trucking and we'll all learn entirely the wrong lesson from these experiences. It'll feel like corporate consolidation of online spaces is an inevitability, and people will just increasingly capitulate. Meanwhile there'll be an obscure userbase of antiquated posters on this website just quietly plodding along without making any headway, and nobody will come to join us because none of dynamism of a vibrant community exists here.

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

I have really fond memories of those old rage comics, they're part of what got me to make an account in the first place. I know they've grown corny as they've aged, but gee so have I. I think most places online can't really replicate the kind of communal rush to engage in the community, I think we've all grown a mite cynical.

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Ooh goody! I should've thought to look for that, thank you very much. Cheers!

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think you're both spot on. What I hope is that by voicing this people can "get with the program" and not reward that kind of content. After all, we can still see downvotes on here ;).

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah I agree with most of what you're getting at, but I think its a bit less of an unknowable alchemy than you're saying. I don't think any of the users you mentioned would have devoted their time to making their website better if they didn't fundamentally trust the website or the community they're catering to. That trust is built by transparency by those making the website, and clear articulation by the userbase about what, and specifically why they want to see features. We now know what happens when administrators fundamentally violate that contract, and it honestly felt like a betrayal when Reddit did it. We have a role to play in helping to make a place successful, and informing a set of values by which future admins can evaluate whether or not something is good idea, and hopefully not have ulterior profit motives :).

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You make me optimistic for the future of the fediverse! I'm also struck by how much discussion there is of instances, and how there's still a vibrant marketplace of ideas. It's pretty wild how much google has calcified the rest of the internet, and search has solidified the power of a few companies.

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you! I think we definitely need to think about when and why we defederate other servers. I get the sense that the voice of the server owner is going to be very important in shaping people's experiences, and we risk becoming a stronger echo chamber than Reddit. I think being transparent about our process of evaluation of an instance is going to be really important going forward, and there should definitely be a process put in place to make some semblance of an objective standard for federation.

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah 😅 I'm not old enough to remember aol chat rooms, geocities websites, or limewire. It just felt like there was an element to the internet at the edge of my early experience that held so much promise and was so much more open, that seems to have largely gone away. I think a bunch of that has to do with the monopolization of power of so many of these companies, and how so much content is now only discoverable through them. Hopefully we're learning our lesson about the consequences of monopoly now.

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right, still getting used to the federated nature of it all. It's a bit strange calling it many websites though, a bunch of different instances that all have mostly the same copied base code that all talk to each other is a bit of a gray area, no? Since nothing is indexed for google, it also kind of reinforces that feeling, like a very dim web.

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 33 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Yeah that's a fair point. For me it was the constant twitter screenshots/ tiktok reposts and repeated and shallow discussion of whatever bullshit fill in the blank political figure/ tech billionaire was doing that was killing the fun for me. I really think memes were more fun back in 2012-~2018 or so, mostly because there seemed to be more emphasis on novelty, but the endless soyjack reposts or dead tv show memes (cough the office) were definitely getting stale. I think it works better when memes are on hobby/niche subreddits because I think they invited discussion in the comments, but man are they useless on anything related to current events. Some subreddits did it really well though, places like noncredibledefense (that's the only one I can think of rn) really had a unique voice and were making new formats.

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah I think this is a good point. I'm still getting used to the interface, I wish there was a bit more salient of a way of discerning what is a kbin post on the all feed? I know I can look underneath the title of the post, but maybe having an icon (like whatever the logo ends up being) on the right side of the title might be a good idea to privilege kbin's posts for kbin users over lemmy's without exempting those posts from the feed?

[–] bttoddx@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah I think my tldr does this better, this just repeats a bunch of lines from my post. Chatgpt has a long way to go yet.

 

I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved their stated goal of serving as a viable alternative to Reddit. Places like Voat, Ruqqus, or Parler promptly turned themselves into extremist shitholes and imploded. The truth is most internet communities which found and advertise themselves as an alternative to Reddit die.

However, I think this newest wave of searching for an alternative has more legs than I think I’ve ever seen, and the key to that is the kind of users who are moving. The people who were pissed off by the recent changes are the old guard of the internet. These are the people who still remember searching for and finding RIF, Apollo, or AlienBlue (before it was bought), and have the technical know-how to care about the quality and usability of their platform. I think you all are people who engage with their online spaces with intention, and because of that I believe that we have more of a shot at making this work than I’ve witnessed since I joined Reddit all those many years ago.

In order to make this all work out though, I think it’s really important to cast our thoughts toward what made the websites that have come before us successful. Every single one of these spaces have distinct ways of interaction that indirectly communicate their ideologies. Memes, in-jokes, and lingo form the backbone of online communities and help to direct users back to the source, but they never gain real purchase without a unique viewpoint. I’m pretty sure I can confidently suss out whether a meme comes from 4Chan, Reddit, or Tumblr, just through the message conveyed and the template used. For an online platform to have relevance and draw, I believe it absolutely needs to have an individual and communicable perspective.

Now I am aware that much of this is organically generated, but I think we underestimate how much of it isn’t. The structure of a website clearly communicates to users its core values, and users almost certainly respond to that. The fact that users are by default anonymous on the Chans absolutely contributes to the unique “flavor” of those websites, and the subreddit structure of Reddit allows it to contain a greater variety of clashing values. We can already see some of this on the Fediverse, the tension engendered by the federated instances I think places greater emphasis on building consensus. The fact that an entire server can be excised at will from a group of other like-minded server owners means that one has to always have an eye towards the common consensus, and I think we will see many fights over this in the not-so-distant future.

So as we go forward, and while we are in the most nascent part of this website’s lifespan, I think we should be discussing and commenting on what we think is most important about this space. I’m already seeing that people think that Kbin is “nicer than Reddit” and you’re more convinced that you’re interacting with real people. I think this is all good, and I think that while we’re making content, we need to have an eye on putting that particular spin on all the things we brought over from where we came from. Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats, and having our own slang, but for right now we need to be thinking hard about what we want out of our online lives and how this website can be built to serve those purposes. I think the risk of not doing that, and forever being only a federated Reddit clone is going to leave people forever jonesing for the experiences they had on Reddit, and this space is going to die just like every other attempted alternative has before.

TLDR: Now that we've all left Reddit, for this new place to live my opinion is that we need to have more discussions about what our principles are, and we need to make unique content that brings people to this website.

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